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A report, issued by the AAUP, the College Media Association, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and the Student Press Law Center, that shines light on threats to student media. The report cites multiple cases in which college and university administrations have exerted pressure in attempts to control, edit, or censor student journalistic content. This pressure has been reported in every segment of higher education and every institutional type: public and private, four-year and two-year, religious and secular. The report finds that administrative efforts to subordinate campus journalism to public relations concerns are inconsistent with the mission of higher education to foster intellectual exploration and debate. And while journalism that discusses students’ dissatisfaction with the perceived shortcomings of their institutions can be uncomfortable, it fulfills an important civic function.

This report concerns the action taken on February 25, 2016, by the Board of Curators of the University of Missouri to dismiss Dr. Melissa A. Click, an assistant professor of communication, from the faculty of the University of Missouri on charges of misconduct without having afforded her the faculty hearing called for under both the university’s regulations and the recommended standards of the American Association of University Professors. This action followed more than three months of controversy surrounding Professor Click’s confrontations with two University of Missouri students on November 9, 2015.

This report concerns the action taken on December 11, 2015, by the administration of the College of Saint Rose to eliminate twenty-seven academic programs and terminate the appointments of fourteen tenured and nine tenure-track faculty members as the result of an “academic program prioritization” process.

Last year full-time continuing faculty experienced an inflation-adjusted increase in salary exceeding 2 percent for the first time since the Great Recession began more than seven years ago. This year, inflation-adjusted full-time continuing faculty salaries increased by 2.7 percent. Table A provides four decades of data on the percentage change in average salaries in both nominal (actual dollar) and real (inflation-adjusted) terms from one year to the next for all full-time continuing faculty whose institutions participated in the AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey.

This report, released for comment in March 2016 and issued in its final version in June 2016, evaluates the history and current uses of Title IX and identifies tensions between current interpretations of Title IX and the academic freedom essential for campus life to thrive. The report makes recommendations for how best to address the problem of campus sexual assault and harassment while also protecting academic freedom, free speech, and due process.

This report describes departures from shared governance standards in the hiring of new University of Iowa President J. Bruce Harreld, appointed by the Iowa Board of Regents in spite of overwhelming objections from faculty. The investigation found that in contrast to historical practice at the university, which had been to involve faculty fully in presidential searches, the board designed this search process specifically to prevent any meaningful faculty role in the selection of the final candidate.

This report describes severe departures from generally accepted standards of academic governance at Union County College in Cranford, New Jersey and details how the administration sharply diminished the role and influence of the faculty in the college’s governance system.

This report concerns the cases of seven full- time faculty members at Felician College, most of them long-serving, who were notified in late January (along with nine colleagues who did not contact the AAUP) that their services were being terminated in June. The administration initially attributed its actions to a decline in enrollment that it claimed had resulted in financial exigency. The report also discusses the deplorable conditions for academic freedom and faculty governance in the absence of a tenure system.

This report addresses the actions taken by administrators at the University of Southern Maine to discontinue, reduce, and consolidate numerous academic departments and to reduce the size of the faculty by fifty positions at the end of the fall 2014 semester. The investigating committee sought to determine whether the program closures and retrenchments were conducted in accordance with AAUP-supported principles and due-process standards. The committee concludes that the USM administration violated the Association’s standards on financial exigency and program discontinuance, as well as those on academic governance.

This report finds that the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) administration and the board of trustees of the University of Illinois violated principles of academic freedom when they withdrew a tenured faculty appointment that had been offered to Professor Steven Salaita. The job offer was withdrawn after Professor Salaita made a series of impassioned Twitter posts expressing outrage about the war in Gaza.

This report finds that University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center's administration violated commonly accepted academic standards when it terminated the appointments of two professors. One professor had twelve years of service and the other had thirty. Both had been recommended for “renewal of tenure” by the faculty personnel committee.

Last year, the American Association of University Professors launched the One Faculty campaign to improve the job security and working conditions of contingent faculty. Writing about the campaign in the November–December 2014 issue of Academe, Jamie Owen Daniel, the AAUP’s director of organizing, asserted that “shrinking public resources, administrators’ random introduction of ‘creative disruption’ agendas, and the increasing possibility that state legislators will push for more right-to-work legislation” can be resisted only by “reclaiming the narrative” through “aggressive and unified faculties organized to speak together.”

A current threat to academic freedom in the classroom comes from a demand that teachers provide warnings in advance if assigned material contains anything that might trigger difficult emotional responses for students.

Allowing any third-party control of academic matters is inconsistent with principles of academic freedom, shared governance, and the institutional autonomy of colleges and universities. Confucius Institutes function as an arm of the Chinese state and are allowed to ignore these principles.

Tensions over control of the fruits of faculty scholarship have been slowly building since the 1980s and have intensified over the last three years. There have long been differences of opinion over ownership of patentable inventions, but recently a number of universities have categorically asserted that they own the products of faculty research. And there is increasing institutional interest in declaring ownership of faculty intellectual property subject to copyright—most notably evident in demands that faculty members cede ownership of online courses and other instructional materials to their universities, a trend that began escalating in the 2012–13 academic year.

The management of inventions, patents, and other forms of intellectual property in a university setting warrants special guidance because it bears on so many aspects of the university’s core missions, values, and functions, including academic freedom, scholarship, research, shared governance, and the transmission and use of academic knowledge by the broader society.

This revised report brings up to date and expands upon the Association’s 2004 report on the same topic, while affirming the earlier report’s basic principles. Academic freedom, free inquiry, and freedom of expression within the academic community may be limited to no greater extent in electronic format than they are in print, save for the most unusual situation where the very nature of the medium itself might warrant unusual restrictions,